Switzerland: Energy Transition Will Fail Without Nuclear Power

Wind turbines and photovoltaic panels are nice toys, but by themselves “they will be totally insufficient for an energy transition.” According to a study by the Federal Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne presented in the Sunday, May 5, pages of Sonntags Zeitung, the Sunday supplement to the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, “Switzerland will need eight new large power plants by 2050, each of which should be equivalent to a nuclear power plant.” In other words, the energy transition will not be possible without restoring confidence in nuclear power. In this context, one cannot help but worry about the economic future of Germany, which has shut down all its nuclear power plants and is now sinking into an unprecedented recession.

“If we want to have a reliable energy supply in Switzerland in 2050, we will need much more than most politicians and authorities assume today,” said in an interview Andreas Züttel (pictured), professor of physical chemistry at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and one of the authors of a sensational report refuting conventional views on green energy and the energy transition.

The conclusion reached by the researchers in Switzerland, but which applies to all European countries, as well as the world, speaks clearly: “While solar panels and wind farms are important for the energy transition, solar panels and wind farms alone will not be enough to electrify road transportation and replace oil heating with heat pumps.” According to the study, once old nuclear power plants are dismantled, at least eight large power plants will be needed in addition to existing hydroelectric plants to provide what is known as “bandwidth power,” i.e., the electric current that flows continuously and not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.

According to the report’s authors, “future electricity demand will clearly be higher than the estimates circulating in recent months,” while “future demand for electricity storage has been consistently underestimated by the authorities and, in particular, by the solar lobby.” And there was certainly no shortage of embarrassing statements from the perspective of extremist renewable energy propagandists: “Heating oil and gasoline can be stored almost indefinitely,” explained Andreas Züttel, “and so fossil fuels are always available exactly when we need them.”

Nevertheless, the Swiss researchers offered an olive branch to the “greenies” by proposing various “combined” solutions to ensure that they are not left “empty-handed” during the energy transition. There are “seven different technologies that could be considered for power plants,” including hydrogen power plants, new nuclear power plants, new hydroelectric power plants, and more. It is also possible to combine different technologies into a single power plant: for example, several solar power plants could be combined with a new hydroelectric reservoir to form a power plant so that turbines can provide electricity when clouds cover the sun. To be as precise as possible, the authors of the study finally “compared the costs of different power plants” by including in their calculations the investment costs for construction and costs for operation and dismantling, and came to a conclusion that Sonntasg Zeitung found “surprising”: the cheapest would be nuclear power plants capable of providing “broadband” energy at very, very low costs.